Whether the pretty oriental tale of its origin be true or not—and it requires an oriental faith to believe it in the face of contradictory evidence—none can gaze upon that little emblem of 'Life in Death'—so homely and frail, and yet so beautiful and so eternal—without peculiar emotion.
What drooping, weary soul, parched with the dust of earth, but sometimes longs to be forever steeped in that great Love in which it may expand and bloom—casting its treasures upon Heavenly soil,—and glowing evermore with the radiance of the Awakening.
RECOGNITION.
Now in the chambers of my heart is day,
And form and order. A most sacred guest
Is come therein, and at his high behest
Beauty and Light, who his calm glance obey,
Flew to prepare them for his regal sway.
Now solitude I seek, which once, possessed,
I fled; now, solitude to me is blessed,
Wherein I hearken Love's mysterious lay,
And hold with thee communion in my heart.
That thou art beautiful, thou who art mine—
That with thy beauty, Beauty's soul divine
Has filled my soul, I muse upon apart.
In the blue dome of Heaven's eternity,
Rising I seem upborne by thoughts of thee.
THE SEVEN-HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY OF A GERMAN CAPITAL.
Most of our countrymen look upon Germany as all one. The varieties of outlandish customs, costumes, and dialects observed among our emigrant population from that land are little noticed, and never regarded as marking districts of the fatherland from which they severally sprung. One of the most fruitful themes of pleasant humor and biting sarcasm in our periodical literature and in the popular mouth, is the ignorance betrayed by enlightened foreigners, and especially foreign journalists, in regard to the geography of our country; as though America were, par excellence, THE land, and on whatever other subject the world might, without meriting our contempt, fail to inform itself, our country, not only in its glorious history and more glorious destiny, but in the minuter details of the picture, must be understood and acknowledged. This charge of ignorance is not unfounded. Often have I been not a little amused when an intelligent German has inquired of me as a New Yorker, with the sure hope of news from his friend in Panama, or another to learn how he might collect a debt from a merchant at Valparaiso, or a third to be informed why he received no answers to letters addressed to friends in Cuba, and so on. But if the tables were turned upon us, there is no point on which we should be found open to a more fearful retribution than on this. I know an American gentleman of education—and he told me the story himself—who applied at Washington for letters to our diplomatic representatives in Europe, and who had sufficiently informed himself to be on the point of sailing for several years' residence abroad, and still, when letters were handed him for our consul-general at Frankfort and our minister in Prussia, asked, with no little concern, whether a letter to our minister in Germany could not be given him. I knew a correspondent of a New York journal fearfully to scourge a distinguished German for his ignorance of American geography. The same person, after months of residence in Munich, having about exhausted the resources which it offered him for his correspondence, gave a somewhat detailed account of the affairs of Greece, in which he referred to King Otho as brother of King Lewis of Bavaria, although almost any peasant could have told him that the latter was father to the former.
Indeed, there is nothing strange about this, unless it be that any one should deem himself quite above the class of blunders which he satirizes. It is less to be wondered at that one should continue to hurl his satiric javelins at those who commit the same class of errors with himself, since he seldom becomes aware of his own ridiculous mistakes. In regard to Germany, our people know but its grand divisions and its large cities; and of its people among us but their exterior distinctions, and mainly those offered to the eye, arrest attention. We meet them as servants or employés in kitchens, shops, and gardens, and on farms, or as neighbors, competitors, or associates in business. At evening we separate, and they go to their own domestic or social circles, where alone the native character speaks itself freely forth in the native language and dialect. There only the homebred wit and humor freely flow and flash. There the half-forgotten legends and superstitions, the utterance of which to other ears than those of their own people is forbidden—perhaps by a slight sense of shame, perhaps by the utter failure of language,—together with the pastimes and adventures of their native villages or districts, are arrested in their rapid progress to oblivion, as they are occasionally called forth to amuse the dull hours or lighten the heavy ones of a home-sick life in a foreign land. Could we but half enter into the hearts of the peasant Germans who move among us, and are by some regarded as scarcely raised in refinement and sensibility above the rank of the more polished domestic animals of our own great and enlightened land, we should often find them replete with the choicest elements of the truly epic, the comic, and the tragic.
How seldom do the people of different lands and languages learn to understand each other—become so well acquainted as to appreciate each other's most engaging traits? The German emigrant seeks a home among us, and desires to identify himself with us. The costume of his native district is thrown off as soon as he needs a new garment, often much sooner. His language is laid aside except for domestic use and certain social and business purposes, as soon as he has a few words of ours. These words serve the ends of business, and rarely does he ever learn enough for any other purpose. The other parts of the man remain concealed from our view. He is to us a pure utilitarian of the grossest school. His pipe suspended from his mouth, his whole time given to his shop, his farm, or his garden, and to certain amusements unknown to us, he is deemed to vegetate much like the plants he grows, or to live a life on the same level with that of the animal he feeds, incapable of appreciating those higher and more refined pleasures to which we have risen—in other words, the true type of dulness and coarseness. An intelligent Welshman once told me that he could not talk religion in English nor politics in Welsh. So with the Germans among us. Their business and politics learn to put themselves into English, their religious, domestic, and social being remains forever shut up in the enclosure of their mother tongue, and from this we rashly judge that what they express is all there is of them. We have never considered the difficulty of transferring all the utterances of humanity from their first and native mediums to foreign ones. It is easy to learn the daily wants of life or the formal details of business in a new language. Here words have a uniform sense. But the nice shades and turns of thought which appear in the happiest and most delicate jets of wit and humor, and which form the great staples of pleasant social intercourse, depend upon those subtile discriminations in the sense of words which are rarely acquired by foreigners. One may have all the words of a language and not be able to understand them in sallies of wit. How nicely adjusted then must be the scales which weigh out the innumerable and delicate bits of pleasantry which give the charm to social life! The words to relate the legends connected with the knights and castles of chivalry, saints, witches, elves, spooks, and gypsies, the foreigners among us never acquire, or at least never so as to have the ready and delicate use of them in social life, until their foreign character has become quite absorbed in the fully developed American, and the taste, if not the material for picturing the customs and legends of the fatherland are forever gone.